


Just Enough Dark to See

by ElbridgeGerry



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: EU references aplenty, F/M, Gray Jedi, Mostly Canon Compliant, Post Episode IX, Praying to our dear Jar Jar Abrams to make gray jedi a thing again, jedi academy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-03 15:59:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13344582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElbridgeGerry/pseuds/ElbridgeGerry
Summary: Bringing balance to the Force, reviving the Gray Jedi, building a family and all the things in between. Nothing happens in the Skywalker family without a little melodrama.





	1. Chapter 1

It is two years after the fall of the First Order when she first lays eyes on the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine. It is, of course, a place she’s heard much about, featuring in smugglers’ legends describing the trove of historical artifacts to be scavenged and sold off at unthinkably high prices, and from Master Skywalker, who spoke of the slaughtering of the Jedi Council by Darth Traya many millennia before their own time. 

In the years since she left Jakku, she has yet to become bored by vitality. She keeps plants, where she can, finding herself enchanted by the prospect of life and by the slight tickling the Force signatures of flowers give off. Here on Dantooine, where the environment is neither striking in its natural abundance like Takodana or its natural dearth like Jakku, she breathes easier. The atmosphere on Dantooine is perfectly balanced, its single sun beats down on the hilly terrain with a warm objective, and the slight breeze whistles the tall grass, raising light goosebumps on her uncovered arms. It is right that they should make this there home. 

Rey thinks of Bastila Shan who, four thousand years prior, had fallen in love and momentarily brought balance to the Force. She had read of Bastila and Revan in the texts she stole from Luke on Ahch-To. Bastila’s story was, for lack of better terminology, the consummate tragedy. She looks at her companion, and wonders if perhaps he is more like Bastila, tortured and turned to the Dark Side in the face of unbeatable odds.

_Never tell me the odds, kid_ , Han Solo’s voice rings out, and she’s unsure if it's in her own head or her Force bondmate’s. This is one of the many things she’s learned to live with in the past half decade, not just the control of the Force she now possesses, but the _lack_ of control, too. She has spent six years living with somebody else in her mind, an unbreakable connection that bridges all of space and time.

 She stops at the top of the hill they’ve been climbing for the past five minutes and takes a deep breath. The Jedi Enclave sprawls before her, somehow totally at odds with its surroundings and yet perfectly in sync. A statue honouring the Jedi Council sits at the center of its low ramparts. _How arrogant_. Beside her, Ben Solo lets out a gentle laugh, disrupting the peace surrounding them. She glances at him, her eyebrow cocked in confusion.

“The last time I was here I said the same thing,” he says, pulling his hood down and shaking his head to push the dark hair from his face.

He looks much healthier now than when she had first met him, his skin less sallow and his eyes less gaunt. He still bears the scar from her lightsaber, and though she wishes she felt otherwise she will never regret giving it to him. They were different people back then, tethered to outdated poles of morality and notions of power that isolated them from the world, drove them each to madness.

They descend the hill, and she reaches out for his hand, smacking his side when he jokingly pulls away from her. In spite of it all, she feels a lightness with him that she’s never felt in her whole life. There are always tugs of fear in their relationship, it’s not as though they haven’t spent most of their time together trying to destroy one another, but the moments of levity are lighter than the air they breathe, and – she thinks – more powerful than the Force itself. She learned long ago not to compare him to his family, not because he wouldn’t like it, but because those comparisons simply didn’t ring true. He wasn’t Han Solo, he wasn’t Leia Organa or Luke Skywalker, and he certainly wasn’t Anakin Skywalker. He was Ben Solo, through and through, a tortured boy who had grown up into a broken man who had only just begun to heal himself. That had been another thing she had learned: no matter how much she wished she could, she could not heal him, it was a process he would have to undertake himself, though certainly not without ample and eternal support from her.

They enter the temple through the right most door, mentally cataloguing everything they’ll have to repair over the coming weeks and months. The inside of the temple is several degrees cooler than the outside, and Rey swings her rucksack off her shoulder and onto the ledge of a long-defunct fountain.

“I told you you’d need it,” Ben says, eyeing her as she pulls her cloak from her bag and fastens it over her shoulders.

“Yes thank you, oh wise one.” Her sarcasm elicits a cheeky grin from Ben as he ducks beneath a fallen tree branch and into one of the several hallways extending outwards from the courtyard they stand in.

“Shit,” Ben mutters, only just loud enough for her to hear as she catches up to him. She follows his line of sight and a wave of excitement crashes over her.

“No way,” she chirps, grinning as she unholsters her saberstaff, “I’ve only read about Laigreks, this is too cool.” She can feel Ben roll his eyes through their Force bond, but she doesn’t care as she activates her staff, the silver glow lighting up her face in the darkened corridor. The crystal was mined from Tatooine, an homage to her late master that didn’t require the deification he so despised. Anakin Skywalker’s sapphire lightsaber had been lost to history, the remaining pieces of which had been destroyed by Rey in one of her first and purest outbursts of rage.

They make quick work of clearing the hallways, opening the doors to each room as they pass. The temple is far bigger and far more complex than she’d initially assumed, and the whole building rings out with history. Vines curtain the stone walls, and the terracotta tiles are chipped and destroyed in places, the hieroglyphic markings from Jedi Masters past damaged beyond recognition. Still, it’s an overwhelming place, the whole thing practically vibrates with the power of the Force rushing through it. She can’t imagine how electric this would have felt filled with pupils. How it will feel.

The bedrooms are at the northernmost section of the temple, with large but grimy windows that face out over the Khoonda Plains. The find what they assume to be the Masters’ bedrooms, taking the one with the largest anteroom and widest window. Rey drops her stuff, leaving Ben to unpack as she goes to clear the temple’s landing pad. It doesn’t take much work to clean up, and it’s not long before she’s setting back out to the Plains to retrieve the _Falcon_ and park it in its new home.

 

•º

 

The sun is starting its descent in the sky when she touches down in the temple. Artoo beeps a reminder at her about the second set of rations Finn had stowed away in the cargo hold once he’d seen how little they had packed for themselves.

“Any luck with the ‘fresher?” She asks Ben when she notices him leaning against the threshold of the landing pad entrance as she unloads their cargo.

“Bad luck,” he says, crooking his fingers to levitate a crate of rations toward his direction.

Rey stops, plants her hands on her hips, and considers the enormity of what they’re undertaking. Not just the physical enormity – the temple is every bit as big as the resistance bases she’d spent the first interesting years of her life hunkered down in – but the metaphysical enormity as well.

“It won’t be easy,” Ben says, interrupting her thoughts.

“It’s just a ‘fresher, we’ll go to Khoo–“

“Rey.”

“I know,” she says, sighing heavily. “But when has easy ever been a word we use?”

 

 •°

 

Later, as Ben heats up their rations, Rey searches through the holocrons she’s been tracking down and coveting. She can’t get Bastila Shan out of her head, she can’t force the story of Revan to simmer down and give her peace.

“We have to deal with the code and the curriculum eventually,” Ben calls to her from the other room. It’s a discussion she’s been dreading, they fought so terribly the last time they tried to work through it that she’d had to bargain with him to find their Academy before they tried again. She hums a non-committal acknowledgement and tosses a holocron discussing Jolee Bindo onto their bed. He’d come in handy. 

“You’ll need to trust me,” she says, sitting down to eat. He looks startled. It’s an argument they’ve danced around before, his desire to protect her versus her need to be independent, but never one they’ve breached so explicitly. She knows it’s tough for him, his entire family is gone and it’s not as though he ever readjusted easily to life outside the First Order, she’s the only one he has now.

“Of course I’ll trust you.”

“What we’re doing is totally unprecedented, we’ll be delving into stuff that has been hidden for hundreds, thousands of years. If we don’t totally trust one another, we could make mistakes, things could go wrong, we can’t… we can’t let that happen.”

“You think I don’t know that? Do you think that I’m not acutely aware what one misstep could do to either of us? To the galaxy? You owe me better than that, Rey.” Ben doesn’t get angry anymore, in place of anger, he just radiates disappointment. Sometimes, when she’s fighting him and he’s barely pushing back, she wishes he would just yell and scream at her, fight her like they used to so she could feel the guilt and remorse she wants to feel.

“It just feels like you treat me like a youngling, still. I’m not, I treat this stuff every bit as seriously as you do, I know _what happens_ when it goes wrong.” She’s cranky because she’s exhausted. It’s not just moving cargo that tires her out, but the very aura of the building sapping energy from her. She lets her head fall into her hands. Ben reaches out, holding her wrist. 

“It’ll be like this for a few days, it always is with temples like this. When I started at Luke’s temple I laid in bed for an entire day it took so much out of me.” She sits silently. Ben never talks about his life training under Luke, and if he’s going to continue she doesn’t want to stop him. “And I hope you don’t think I treat you like a child. I’m following you across the galaxy on an endlessly ambitious and dangerous project. I wouldn’t be following a child on something like that.” A beat. “And besides, if you were a child the way I treat you would _definitely_ be illegal.” Rey lets out a groan that turns into giggles despite herself.

 

 •°

 

For a while, sleeping next to Ben was a waking hell. Nightmares tormented him night after night, and she could only alleviate them by accessing their Force bond and taking on some of the pain herself. She would never tell him what she was doing or how negatively it impacted her, but there was a time when she thought the burden of carrying his pain would kill her.

In time, as the nights passed and the terrors slipped into the past, she spent less of her nights tangled up in their bond and more nights sleeping. It was then that she began to understand that they weren’t _just_ irrevocably linked by the Force.

Now, laying beside him in this great, big, ancient enclave filled with the ghosts of hope, it is she who is at risk of falling victim to nightmares. The path she has chosen for them is an intimidating one, beyond anything she could’ve come imagined in her wildest dreams.

She pushes the blankets off of her, rising quietly and going to the window. Dantooine’s two moons cast a pale glow onto the grasslands. She thinks of Jolee Bindo and Nayama, of Bastila Shan and Revan, and of the horrors they suffered at the hands of emotional attachment. Bastila, alone in the world with the child of someone who had once been a Sith Lord, estranged from the Jedi Council. Jolee Bindo, exiled because of how weak he had been made by love, the death of many Jedi came beause he could not detach himself. On Jakku, she had been strong because she had been alone. She had survived because she had not loved.

_Except your family_.

She spins around, unsure of where the voice had come from. The room is dark and empty, save for the soft light of the moons seeping through the windows and Ben’s sleeping form on the bed.

_You think your love for your family makes you weak._

She runs from the room, following the voice. Skidding into the hallway, she checks her angles, equal parts fascinated by the voice and terrified by what she might see.

“Where are you?” She whispers into the placid darkness.

_You fear what makes you human._

She takes off down the corridor where the voice echos. It’s a hallway she doesn’t think she’s been through yet, and there’s still plenty of debris strewn across it.

_Look for yourself, and you will find only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for others, and you will find life._

She whips around a corner and into a room whose half-a-century old lights flicker pathetically to life. She’s in a holocron library, with two floors of shelves that each raise twenty feet into the air, stretching as many feet across. There are rows upon rows of these shelves, though most of the holocrons have long been destroy or scavenged, the occasional one remains, albeit in poor condition. 

She is allowed but two steps into the library before she is thrown to the ground. She braces for an impact that never comes, and her hands and knees fall through the tiled floor.

A vise clamps around her ribcage as she attempts to let out a cry of surprise, and her vision goes dark.

She’s in a bitter, harsh desert, the sun singing the back of her neck and the wind grating sand against her exposed skin. She’s lived this a thousand times before: this is the moment her family abandons her to the Jakku wasteland. She instinctively looks up, ready to track the fading figure of her parents’ shuttle. No shuttle appears, and Unkar Plutt’s ginormous hands don’t close around her, dragging her away.

Before she registers a change, she’s running towards the _Millennium Falcon,_ First Order fighters raining down hellfire on her. She turns to check after Finn, but he’s not there, he’s not anywhere as round after round of laser fire focuses in on her. She can’t breathe.

The forest on Starkiller base. Her snow-soaked clothes lashing cold air against her as she flies through the night air. She knows the tree trunk is coming before she hits it, she has relived this, too, a thousand times before. What little air is left in her lungs is ripped out as her spine makes contact with the tree, and she waits for her limp body to tumble into the snow drift below her.

Instead, she falls to the cold, hard floor of _The Supremacy,_ Snoke’s foreboding laugh echoing across the throne room. She’s nineteen years old, and she’s going to survive this. The Praetorians clutch their weapons, watching her every movement. Kylo Ren stands before her, and this _is_ Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo. She cannot see his scared eyes behind the obsidian visor, and a sick murmur in the Force tells her they aren’t there at all.

Ren twists his lightsaber, she knows what happens next. He’s using the Force to manipulate Anakin's – her – lightsaber. He will not kill her, in his hubris Snoke has not realised that his apprentice’s loyalties have shifted. She tries to gasp a breath though the air will not come.

“And kills his true enemy,” Snoke booms, shaking the walls of the throne room. She prepares for the Force hold over her to break once Snoke dies, when Ben Solo momentarily wins the battle for Kylo Ren's solo.

The scarlet lightsaber ignites, and she can feel the fire of a thousand suns burning at the hollow of her throat where the saber pierces her skin.

This is what it must’ve felt like to be on Hosnian Prime, she thinks, to be incinerated by a blinding red light, an existential betrayal. Her whole body is wracked by waves of fire, crashing from her extremities to her chest, burning her alive. She screams and screams and screams and not a sound comes out. Pain, straight through to her bones.

In the end, it shouldn’t surprise her that fire would be how she’d die. All she had known for nineteen years was fire made touchable, the sand that cut and scarred her and made her skin tough, the brutalising heat of the sun turning her over and drying her out, the emptiness in her stomach raging like a wildfire. She screams, still silently, as the fire consumes her, destroying her inch by inch.

She is nothing but pain.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References:  
> [ Bastila Shan ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bastila_Shan)  
> [ The Jedi Enclave ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_Enclave)  
> [ Laigreks ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Laigreks)  
> [ The crystal powering Rey's saberstaff, ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Durindfire_\(crystal\))because purple as the conflict colour is dumb as hell.  
> The quote starting "look for yourself..." was stolen from CS Lewis and altered to be less religious.


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes with her face pressed to the cool terracotta tile, a chill washing over her body. She pushes herself into a sitting position, reaching up to her throat to check the extent of her wound. But there is no wound to be found, her fingers brushing smooth, undamaged skin. So she’s not dead.

She reaches out with the Force to see who else is around her. A couple stray Laigreks, some Kinraths outside the Enclave walls, and Ben, peaceful, but awake. She scrambles to her feet, keen to get back to him before he begins to worry.

The windows she passes indicate it’s early morning, soft pink and purple light brushes the yellowing grass. It’s eminently peaceful outside the temple, a breeze no stronger than a baby’s breath disturbs the world. She still struggles to shake off the remnants of her nightmare, her fingertips burn as she grabs the threshold of the door to their room, swinging herself through it as cheerfully as she’s capable of.

“Where’d you get off to?” Ben asks, not turning from the crate he’s unpacking. She pushes carefully into their bond to see whether it’s a loaded question. _He has no idea._

“Exploring,” she sets herself down on a chair, watching as he unwraps a small box of mechanical components.

“And how many portions are your discoveries worth?” At first, she’d been quick to anger when Ben made fun of her scavenging past, sore to the thought that all he might ever see her as was the deprived girl from Jakku living on borrowed luck. As they grew closer, she realised it wasn’t an attack on her, it was how he processed his own trauma. With a black cloud constantly at his back, it could only make sense to mock the weather.

“I didn’t bring anything back. Found a holocron library though. Most of it’s been ransacked, I imagine we have the Empire to thank for that. What’s left isn’t anything to shake a stick at, but at least it’s there at all.”

“Always so optimistic.” She watches the taut muscles of his shoulder move, the ragged scars on his back shaping and reshaping with every movement. “I can feel you staring at me.”

“Should I stare at somebody else?” He stops abruptly, and she grins. “I could always comm Poe, I’m sure he’d be happy to show off for me.”

“I never imagined you’d die at Finn’s hands but I suppose we all have lapses in judgement.”

“You know there were plenty of men back in Republic City who would’ve bought me a drink.”

“I know.” She sighs huffily at his resilience. He laughs at her. _He actually laughs at her_. She throws herself to her feet, ready to grumble, before she’s slammed against the wall behind her, a light Force barrier stifling the impact. She’s hitting a lot of walls recently.

“None of them are crazy enough to really handle you,” Ben growls, his eyes dark and his hair hanging in his face. Finally, a reaction. She puts on her best girlish giggle, lifting herself onto her toes to press a chaste kiss to his cheek, before duck out below his arms and moving outside his grasp.

She steps towards their bedroom. “I seem to have lost my crazy somewhere. Help me find it?” She spins on her toes, sliding into the bedroom. It doesn’t take more than a second for him to catch up to her, grabbing her by her waist and throwing her onto the bed. The corridor outside echoes brightly with her giggles.

 

 •°

 

It takes several long days to properly set up shop in the Enclave, and many trips to Khoonda to buy everything they need to get the temple up and running in at least a shadow of its former glory. She had been almost deliriously happy in these days, laughing more than she had in years, and even if she ended every day cratered by her exhaustion, her nightmare felt like an eon ago.

A sadness blankets her as she dismantles the final cargo crate, stowing it in the _Falcon’s_ cargo hold. This had all been an exercise in procrastination, delaying the inevitable. She wipes stray hairs away from her sweaty forehead, realising too late she’s streaking oil across her skin.

“So that’s it,” she says, standing on the ramp of the _Falcon_. Artoo buzzes past her, into the temple to do Force knows what.

“So that’s it,” Ben echoes. They look at each other in silence as twilight settles in around them.

“We need a code,” Ben says, breaking the silence, and Rey lets her legs slide out underneath her on the ramp, leaning back from exhaustion.

“Not tonight, _please._ ” She whines. She’s not ready to give up these days, to walk into the hours of fighting and conflict she knows this is going to rile.

“We have to start sometime, it won’t create itself.” She crumples up her face.

“Can’t we… not? Let’s just live here, just you and me, we’ll have some kids and become farmers.”

Ben looks pained, the children issue is one that torments him. They’re not married, there’s really no reason for them to be. She imagines if Leia were still alive she’d have coerced them into it, but without her around, neither of them see a reason for it. It’s not a discussion they’ve ever openly had, but each knows what page the other is on, and has no intention of disturbing that. It’s a losing combination of her fear of attachment and his Jedi training, and there’s no reason to press the issue.

Still, whatever Ben thinks Revan did far worse than Kylo Ren, and Bastila still loved him.

She waves a hand lazily. “Tomorrow. Even if I wanted to I’d be too exhausted to start.” She leans back on the ramp, the metal cooling her head and the night breeze kicking up some goosebumps on her uncovered skin. There’s a moment where she expects Ben to pick her up, carry her to bed, she feels his inclination in the Force. But the moment doesn’t come, he simply turns and walks back into the temple.

Rey lays on the ramp until the stars reveal themselves and she’s finally too cold to countenance the outdoors any longer. It’s not that anything in her life has had any precedent or any instructions, but somehow the thought of building a new Jedi code rocks her to her core. The Jedi and the Sith, two equally destructive sides of the same coin, a coin they’re melting down to forge into something new. Sure, there have been gray Jedi throughout history, but none adhering to a code as seriously as what she and Ben are proposing to do. And never have they ever had an Academy to perpetuate that code. Monumental doesn’t do the size of the task justice.

The breeze follows her through the corridors as she pads along, disengaging lights as she goes.

_T_ _hey sent you? What’s special about you?_

Luke’s words hit her like a stack of bricks and she stops dead in the hallway. Who is she, to not revive the Jedi order but to create an entirely new one? She’s the daughter of drunkards, a scavenging pauper from nowhere. She’s alive because of the mercy and charity of others.

_You’re nothing._

Kylo. Or Ben. She’s not sure. She braces the wall to her side, overwhelmed by emotion.

_You know you’re not nothing._

Ben.

“Get out of my head!” She screams, slamming her hand against the wall, a sickening crack emanating from her knuckles. She cries out, tears streaming down her face.

She hasn’t felt blistering rage like this in years. Since she was a different person. 

 

 •°

 

They had tracked Kylo Ren to Mustafar. “So much killing the past,” she jokes to Chewie as they make planetfall. She hopes the humour will mask her terror as the lava fields come into clear view. Ren is close. Too close, she can feel his Force signature seizing the Force around her, as violently unstable as the ligthsaber he wields. She begins to wheel herself out of the cockpit.

“As soon as I’m out, get as far out of the way as you can and wait for me signal.” She stops to look at Chewie. “You know the drill.”

The surface of the planet is hot, as hot as Jakku but infinitely more humid, like a hot rain blistering the exposed skin on her face and arms. She knows the stories of what happened here, she knows why Kylo has chosen to come here: he intends to finally defeat her and achieve the one thing Darth Vader never could.

She passes the old mining equipment, relics of a time gone by, potentially as old as the myth of Darth Vader himself. She’s played this scenario out a million times in her head before. The Resistance, while rallying, will still be on the back foot for the next several years, even if she is successful in her mission. She has steeled herself for what she must do, any empathy she may have once childishly felt for Kylo Ren evaporated the instant she had heard of General Organa’s death. She has not come to Mustafar to bring him to the Light, she has come to destroy him.

She treks to Darth Vader’s sanctuary, she’s walked this path in countless dreams, she knows the way effortlessly, allowing her to focus on centering herself for what is to come. Kylo Ren’s Force signature nearly crushes her when she draws near to the entrance, he is fire itself, a blaze of white, hot rage.

She approaches his hulking form with none of the visceral rage of the nineteen year old girl who several times faced him alone, untrained and unrefined. Now, the anger is disciplined, a spear of passionate brutality. 

“You were foolish to come alone,” he says to her, his voice shot through with anger.

“As were you.”

“You will not win.” He says, and she laughs, a bitter, broken imitation of a laugh. If Leia died seven months ago, then it has been seven months since she has last laughed honestly. 

“It seems dear leader Snoke’s death has taught you nothing of the dangers of hubris.”

He faces her, and it takes all that she has left not to gasp. She’s not sure if he is haunted or doing the haunting, the circles under his eyes are blood red, his pale skin almost translucent. The scar she gave him on Starkiller Base is rubbed raw, as though he has tried to claw it from his skin. She crushes the niggling sadness she feels for him, igniting her saberstaff and sliding her weight onto her back leg, giving herself up to the inferno. He is not broken enough, a cursory survey of their Force bond tells her he probably does not know of his mother's death. How had he not felt her agony? Had she truly been strong enough to fortify those walls as much as she had hoped she had? 

“Ah,” Ren says calmly, observing her. “Vapaad form. Skywalker always prohibited me from learning that technique.” He activates his own lightsaber, sliding into the twinned Juyo form. “It works better through the Dark Side,” he says through gritted teeth.

She doesn’t waste a moment, letting out a ferocious scream as she breaks into a dead sprint to him, twirling her staff to her side, ready to strike. Their sabers meet in a terrible clash of silver and red. Had she been just a bit weaker, just a bit younger, the force of his blade meeting hers would have thrown her backwards. But she is stronger now, unencumbered by attachments that had once left her susceptible to failure.

It is not an easy fight, these duels between her and Ren never were, but he is clumsier now, his attacks less choreographed and dance-like. He shudders when he attacks, she is able to predict his movements better than before, she is decisively on the offensive. Striking and knocking him back and cornering him, not effortlessly, but powerfully. He is wounded, not physically, but elsewhere. When the time comes, he will be a quick kill, nothing more than a forest creature who put up a good fight. She will be able to turn and leave unscarred.

She knocks him back with a combination of a saber strike and Force push that slams him into the steel wall, shocking him into paralysis.

“This is your end, Ren.” She spits at him, closing in on him.

“So you’ve given up on my birth name. Not a moment too soon.”

“Ben Solo is dead. Murdered, like he murdered his father. Like his sycophants murdered his mother.”

Her suspicions are confirmed as his façade momentarily slips, exposing pure horror. A young man once more, his eyes searching desperately before finding the truth of the words. As long as she had known him he had always been so revealing in his facial expressions. He silently mouths the words before saying them. “Organa is –”

“–gone. Murdered like a dog by the First Order. She wasn’t given the luxury of a quick death like Han Solo, oh no, it took her _hours_ to die. I watched her cry from pain. She _suffered._ Crying out for the family who had been stolen from her, who could never come to her.” There’s no reason for her to tell him the details, it certainly won’t matter when he’s dead, but there’s a part of her that hopes her words will give him the same painful death Leia faced.

A moment of silence passes between them, punctuated only by the roar of flowing lava. It passes as quickly as a slow eternity passes.

Ren throws his lightsaber to the ground, and she watches as it skids away from him, spinning itself to a stop. He falls to his knees with a thud that sounds like snapped kneecaps.

“Do it,” he chokes out. Tears are streaming down his face and his Force signature is more frazzled and erratic than ever, she can’t get a good read on it, can’t decide if this is a feint or not. She has no security.

She screams, slamming her finger on the release holding her saberstaff together, wielding two silver blades instead of one. He must die.

“NO.” She roars, advancing towards him, red clouding her vision and her thoughts. She has waited too long, suffered too much for him to go this easily. The pain of the galaxy sits upon her shoulders, driving her forward, not just for Hosnian Prime, for Han Solo and for Leia Organa, not just for Luke Skywalker and for all those who suffered under the First Order, but out of mourning for herself, for the life she would never get to lead because he existed.

She stops above him, trembling under the weight of her anger. Under the weight of history.

“Please,” he whimpers. Her blades cross one another around his neck, ready for her to draw them together and end all this.

“You deserve this. You monster. Everything… all this… because of you.” She doesn’t know when she started crying, hot tears running down her face, spilling over her lips. “All the pain you’ve caused, you deserve this.”

“Rey,” he begs, her name a soft prayer at his lips. All the rage that has built up like a white hot ball in her chest snaps. She shrieks again, throwing her sabers down. Now, it is her turn to fall to her knees.

“You deserve this,” she repeats, bowing her head towards her knees as sobs wrack her body.

 

 •°

 

“Let me heal it,” he says calmly when she enters the room.

“No!” She snaps, a little too harshly she realises. “No, it’s fine, I’ll, uh, I’ll…” She trails off, realising her only real option is for him to heal it.

He just nods slowly, giving her space. He’s remarkably calm considering how hard she’s just lashed out. She’s often wondered if this bond of theirs has transferred darkness to her and lightness to him, if maybe the true balancing of the Force will happen between them.

“This is a lot bigger than us.” He says, before he realises his mistake. His eyes widen, and he flinches ever so slightly. Her heart hurts at this, that he shrinks away from her.

“I just…” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. Maybe I need some space, some air, I don’t know. It feels like my brain is on fire.”

“Go meditate.”

She shoots him an angry look even though she knows he’s right, and storms past him out of their anteroom.

 

 •°

 

The following morning, she remains on edge, grinding her teeth as she watches the sun rise over the Khoonda Plains. Her meditation had been fruitless, and even reaching out to the Force had failed to ratchet down her mood.

Her headache reaches fever pitch just before Ben wakes. She braces her head between her knees, begging for solace.

When Ben finally lifts himself out of bed (it’s a process), she musters her strength to hide her agony, throwing him a terse smile.

“Feeling any better?” He asks between yawns, rubbing his eyes. He always looks so much younger in the morning, the weight of decades of torment yet to settle on his shoulders.

“Much.”

“Go get your collection, I’ll put some food on.”

 •°

 

“We’ve been at this for hours and we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“Coruscant was not built in a day, Rey.”

 “What do we even want? What are we trying to do?” 

“Balance.”

“I know, but what does that mean? Kill your master to yourself become a master but only if you do it without feeling strong emotions? Detachment but only through hatred?”

“You’re thinking too hard. Simplicity has its virtues.” 

“If you know so much then why don’t you have any better ideas?”

“I imagine, on this, I know less than you do.”

 •°

 

When they break in the evening, Rey is so fragile she feels like even the slightest gust of wind could shatter her. She’s aware Ben knows something is wrong, but she won’t indulge him. This is her problem and her problem alone.

“Food?” Ben asks. She shakes her head, heading towards the ‘fresher, longing for something to soothe the fire prickling at her skin.

The ‘fresher uses real water and she savours every minute of it. Even after six years living in environments where water is plentiful, she still balks at the thought of freely flowing water. It is, even now, an unspeakable luxury. 

She slumps against the metal wall, pressing against their Force bond to see what Ben’s doing. Meditating, of course. He used to be a live wire, now he’s been capped. She won’t pretend to understand where his patience comes from, not anymore. Sometimes, she fears what will happen to him if he ever snaps again. Even more darkly, she fears what will happen to him if _she_ ever snaps.

She shuts the water off, taking measured breaths to try and center herself, to calm her frazzled mind. The soap she brought was a gift from Finn, a mixture of flowers from Yavin 4 that always reminded Rey of sunsets on warm (but not hot) days. It was a comfort, the closest thing to family interactions she’d ever had.

She doesn’t bother dressing, she needs to feel the cool air on her skin. Ben is still meditating when she enters the bedroom, totally undisturbed by her presence. She clamours into bed, sighing when the cold sheets touch her body. Her whole existence is heavy, and there’s no point in fighting the sleep that washes over her.

“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on, are you?” Ben murmurs, sliding his arm around her waist. She’s not sure how long she’d been dozing, but it feels like days.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“You know I don’t believe you.” She rolls over, nuzzling herself into his bare chest. 

“I know.”

 •°

 

It takes weeks for them to realise that coming up with a Gray code is futile, and several weeks more for them to give up on the enterprise all together. It’s been a nasty time, Rey has taken to sleeping on the _Falcon_ , to give her space to breathe and the privacy to wail about her shrieking migraines. More often than not, she has nightmares, the same sensation of being on fire that carries on to the next day, her whole body burning and not a soul around to help her.

By the time they’re rounding out their third standard month on Dantooine, they’ve agreed that coming up with a curriculum for the Academy is where their efforts are best placed.

“My uncle's was surprisingly structured, we had a bit of recreational freedom, but he didn’t treat the Jedi code lightly. Morning meditation at sunrise, then breakfast, then guided meditation – if you were a youngling – or Force power training if you weren’t, followed up by combat for the older kids and recreational time for the younger ones. Dinner at sunset, then evening meditation, then rec time again before lights out.” 

“Was that kind of structure useful? I could never imagine living like that.”

“That’s because you lack discipline.” Ben flashes her a smile that, despite her personal rule against think so, is all Han. She sticks her tongue out at him.

“I guess it was useful. It helped you set a rhythm, to really internalise it as well. This came more simply when you didn’t have to stress about what came next.”

She thinks back to her childhood on Jakku, how everything was uncertain except the desert heat and the hunger in her stomach. A cruel way to live. It’s a cruel world, she supposes.

_Diamonds are forged under lesser conditions._

She looks up at Ben. 

“We have to be good with them,” she says, “give them kinder childhoods than we could’ve hoped for.”

“Goodness is subjective, Rey, by all accounts I had a good childhood.”

“You were tortured by a legacy you should never have had to bare and by a creature born from the Dark.”

“We can never know what’s going on in their heads, that was my uncle’s mistake.” She falls silent, wondering how different history would have been had Luke trusted in Ben more, had not been so deterministic.

“So what do you propose? A lashing every lunchtime? Twenty days isolation out of every fifty?” He flinches, and she realises she’s crossed a line. “I’m sorry,” she says after a long moment. He waves his hand, brushing her words away.

“A break would help, I think.” She’s really offended him, she thinks as he uncrosses his legs and stands up, brushing dust off his robes. “Ben, I am sorry.”

“Leave it, Rey,” he says as he leaves the room, leaving her feeling guilty and vaguely angered.

There’s nothing to be gained by her sitting here uselessly on the floor of their anteroom, so she stands up, watching as the last shreds of her dignity fall to the ground with the dust gathered in the cloth of her robes.

She retreats to the holocron library, clenching her firsts until her nails dig into her palms, leaving light trails of blood down her fingertips. She wipes them on the trailing fabric of her arm wraps before she enters the library, she’s due to wash them anyways.

_Your new Academy will exist without an ideology. It will fail._

“What do you want from me? I’m still too young for this!” A fire erupts in her chest and she stumbles backwards.

_Age is a no excuse. Many have accomplished much more at far younger ages._

“I’m not many,” she grumbles, hoisting herself onto a library table.

_Go to Shili. There you will find the guidance you require._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References:  
>  Kinrath   
>  Holocron   
>  Holocron Library  edited for the purposes of this story to hold holocrons instead of holobooks, mostly because I am too lazy to make a distinction.  
>  Khoonda  which, in my canon, was integrated into the Old Republic's government and prospered, making this both an old ass city, and an interesting one.  
> Leia's dead because I imagine she'll die in IX and as much as I want to do a fix-it, it makes a fun plot point.  
>  Mustafar  using the new canon iteration, because I like the idea of Vader having a big ol' castle like the drama queen he is.  
>  Dog.   
>  Diamonds 
> 
> Thanks for reading and interacting! Classes start back up tomorrow, so I'm trying to write as much as I can before the bigboi assignments hit.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a bit longer than I'd hoped to get out, but I've been dealing with a pretty bad depressive episode recently. Shit happens. Enjoy!

Rey is on edge the next several days, frustrated that she’s being told what to do by some mysterious voice and even more frustrated that she doesn’t have it in her to tell Ben. For his part, he retreats from all but their mandatory interactions, even going so far as to “accidentally” fall asleep in the _Falcon_ one night.

She’s not sure what to make of the voice, what side of the Force it comes from, whether it’s a friend or foe, or if it springs from the Enclave or her own tired mind. She reckons the nightmares and the voice are two separate entities, they come with distinct auras, but she can’t confirm. There’s a part of her that hopes that if she spills her heart to Ben that he’ll have answers for her. Another part fears that if she breathes a word of it he’ll realise she’s just as weak as she’s ever been, careening toward the Dark Side without a thought to stop herself, just as she had on Ahch-To all those years ago.

In their few moments of communication, they’ve agreed that they’ve reached the time to seek out Padawans, to fling open the doors of their Academy and alter the course of history. They’ve plotted the first regions they will search for Force sensitives. It’s an awkward plot, but they’re beginning in the Expansion regions with the Ehosiq region (at Rey’s insistence, so she can visit Shili, a justification she didn’t share with Ben) before working slowly back to the Raioballo system and Dantooine.

There’s no question as to who they’ll be bringing back the Academy first. The man who was the most potent Darksider since Darth Vader and the woman who saved his life are not the two people in the galaxy a parent is likely to hand their child over to. At first, it must be older Force Sensitives who come to the Academy. Later, children can come, but for now, they must build their new Jedi Order sensibly.

She is curled up on a corner of the bed when Ben comes to her, sitting gently beside her, idly smoothing out the covers. “I don’t think we should go together,” he says. She can tell he’s been rehearsing this, she wonders for how long.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She sits up, staring him down.

“You and I, we’ve been under pressure, a tremendous amount, I don’t think we’ll be helping ourselves by going on a significantly more stressful task together. I fear… well, that it could bring about serious damage.”

“Nothing’s permanent.” He sighs.

“I know that. But time is of the essence with this, we don’t have the latitude to let our personal lives get in the way.” She arches an eyebrow.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“That this… all of this, it’s a lot bigger than you and me. We can’t let ourselves become the center of the actions, we have to become more than that.” A lifetime of being made to feel small, insignificant, nothing to the galaxy comes flooding over Rey like a tsunami. She stands.

“So you want me to go do the dirty work? To go drain myself of energy finding others like us, begging them to come study with us, facing down Force only knows what reaction because I _sacrificed everything for you_ and you think, after all that, I should just slink back to the hole I crawled out from? Make myself amenable to the passage of time, just a nobody scavenger who managed to accidentally latch on to some pieces of history?” He looks shocked, as though this was not the reaction he was expecting. He should’ve known better.

“Fuck you, Ben. I deserve better.” She practically runs from the bedroom, determined not to let tears fall.

 

•°

 

The cargo hold of the _Falcon_ is packed up before she even realises the commitment she’s made. She sighs. She’s going to spend her whole life getting boxed into corners by Skywalker men. She does not wait for sunrise on Dantooine to leave, herding Artoo into the cockpit moments before she takes off. She reaches out through their Force bond to check on Ben. He’s sulking. _Typical._ She doesn’t seek him out to say goodbye, just closes the door of the _Falcon_ to Dantooine and goes.

Artoo coos as they make the jump, and Rey pats his metal dome. A cool hour long trip will get them to Mygeeto, the first stop on their trip. It’s not enough time for Rey to sleep, so she leaves Artoo in the cockpit and retreats to the repair bay. In its prime, the _Falcon_ could’ve made the trip in forty minutes, it’s 0.5 class hyperdrives would’ve burned the lines easily. Some tinkering, she believes, is in order.

 

•°

 

The surface of Mygeeto overwhelms her. The second her foot touches the ground she is smacked with the memories of Jedi defeat. Not the Rebellion, no, this was much older, much more profound. A name rises to her lips. _Ki-Adi-Mundi._ She lowers herself to the ground, crossing her legs and stretching her arms out to the ground below her.

•°

Several planets, several failures. At once Rey is the last remnant of the Jedi Knights of old, and the daughter of junk dealers, a scavenger tearing apart the remains of a long and forgotten world in the hope of finding something new, something to be revived. Despite Artoo, she has never felt so alone. The Force bond prods at her subconscious, but she refuses to lean into it. The anger, the pain, she doesn’t even know where it’s coming from, what’s triggering it, except that it feels like a wound in her soul, carefully weaning her from the Force. From Ben.

She meditates long and hard once they land in Havridam City. She doesn’t bother with accomodation, what’s wasn’t destroyed at the end of the Republic was thrown into a recession by the destruction of Starkiller Base and never fully recovered. With just her and Artoo, it’s easier to remain ensconced on the _Falcon_. She briefly exists to meditate outside, to reach out to the Force to find any Force sensitives on the planet, but quickly realises she’s out of luck and returns.

The weight of her failures is crushing her, her shoulders heavy and her soul weary. She knows, rationally, it’s not her fault she hasn’t found anyone yet. If no Force sensitives are on a planet it’s nothing she can alter, but emotionally she feels like a fool. She sits on the cot in the crew quarters, twisting her neck roughly to crack her spine, relaxing as the pops vibrate downwards. She takes a deep breath, rolling her shoulders backwards, and reaches out through the Force.

 _It’s late._ Ben says, though she doesn’t actually hear him.

“I’ve had absolutely no success so far. Not a single one.” Rey moans, waiting for him to make eye contact.

_It was never going to be easy. It took my uncle a year to find his first class._

“What if I’m not doing it right? What if I’m missing somebody?”

_It’s possible. You’ve practiced this, though. You’re stronger than you realise, as always._

“Strength isn’t everything, maybe I’m too wrapped up in myself to notice.” She sighs. Across space, Ben reaches for her, cupping her face in his hand.

_How are you, really?_

“Exhausted. So exhausted.”

 _Will you tell me why?_ She shakes her head.

“No… not yet. There’s something I have to do first.” She knows Ben will vehemently oppose her chasing unknown voices across the galaxy, but had she not learned to listen to unknown voices many years ago, she would not be with Ben now.

 

•°

 

At first, she sits with him because being anywhere else with that much blinding rage coiled inside her stomach would be dangerous for others. She suckerpunches him once, after many hours of concentrated silence passes between them. She just snaps, clocking his jaw with enough force that her hand vibrates with pain afterward. He doesn’t say anything, just runs his hand along the impact site and watches her with those pained, lonely eyes.

Her anger subsides after that. He could have fought back, in her compromised emotional state he probably could have _won_ , but he put up with it.

The next time she comes to him, she reaches out her hand. He takes it, gently, like she’s the most fragile thing in the universe. They meditate, holding each other an arm’s length away. In the morning, when she wakes on the cold floor of the cell just centimetres from him, she notices how young he looks. How untroubled he looks, how innocent.  

When she comes next, she brings news on the deliberations over his future. He has no allies, and Rey is the furthest thing from a politician imaginable, but a new Republic desperate to establish its moral standards seem to favour saving his life, if only to cast him out as an example. When she tells him, she trips over her words, terrified at how happy she seems to be. He is anything but.

She is the Republic’s resident Jedi. She wears it well Kylo tells her, but she is unsure. It’s not just the nascent insecurities that she is Nobody from Nowhere, though that certainly plays a part, but that the ancient Jedi texts she spends most moments of her waking hours poring over don’t quite settle with her. She finds more faults than she is comfortable with, enough precepts that seem barbaric to her.

“There is another way,” Kylo tells her one afternoon. He reaches his hand and she grasps it, nodding after a moment.

“Oh.”

The new Republic’s high council for justice initially balks at her proposition. The very thought of sending a former Sith out to battle Sithspawn he had been responsible for reviving was enough to make one of the councilwomen laugh in Rey’s face.

“They are an evil your Republic soldiers won’t understand. They’ll be slaughtered by creatures they might not even be able to see. I’m not asking for a luxury star cruise instead of punishment. This will be a cruel, painful task.”

“And you, Mistress Jedi? What will your role be? We can hardly expect the last Jedi to waste her time killing pests.”

“Oh, I think you can.”

 

•°

 

She was the spitting image of her father. Rey doesn’t need to ask to know the answer, doesn’t even need to consult the Force to reassure herself, the legend of Wedge Antilles reached even the furthest ends of the galaxy, and especially into the heart of Poe Dameron.

“Why are you following me?” She asks, barely looking up from her Datapad.

“I’m Rey, I –”

“I know who you are, I would’ve killed you earlier if I didn’t.” Rey smirks, she likes her already.

“You’re Force sensitive.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“But you weren’t taken to the Jedi Academy.”

“No. My dad and Luke were old friends, but I think they both realised I didn’t have the temperament for all the Jedi stuff.”

“I don’t, either.” The girl cocks an eyebrow.

“So much for the rumours of the last Jedi, then.”

“I’m a different kind,” Rey watches her closely, “the temperament issue is… not as big a deal.” Finally, the girl puts her datapad down to look at her.

“What do you need from me?”

“How would you feel about training to become a Jedi?”

 

•°

 

Myri, as Rey learns her name is, is a fierce personality. She came to Generis just after the First Order fell, after having spent several years ferrying refugees from the Hosnian System around the galaxy. Her last group was brought here, and she chose to stay with them. She’d spent the two years since the start of the New Republic building up a city here with the Hosnian refugees. She’s young, younger than Rey, and not as scarred by the war. A spiteful thought enters Rey’s mind: the sons and daughters of former war heroes must have been better protected. But no, of course not, Ben was never protected. Neither was Poe, he’d spent his whole life in the throes of the Resistance.

“I’m interested,” Myri says, placing two steins of Corellian spiced ale on the table they’re sitting at. They’d gone back to Myri’s apartment in the fledgling Nèamh City. It’s nothing special, just a small two room space, but she’s startled by how intimate it feels. In all her life Rey has never felt such intimacy in such a small space, even in her hideout back on Jakku.

“Great!” Rey says, beaming. It’s her first success and already she feels the weight lifting from her shoulders. She thinks instantly to Ben, to how proud she hopes he’ll be of her.

“I have conditions, though. You’re asking me to give up my whole life, so I think it’s only fair.” Rey waves her hand lazily.

“Of course, I understand.” Myri slides into the seat across from Rey.

“After my training is done, I come back here. None of this old fashioned monk nonsense, I can’t spend the rest of my life cooped up wearing robes and reading scrolls, my responsibilities, regardless of whatever _sensitivities_ I may have, are here.” For not the first time in a very small number of years, Rey is taken aback. In the melodramatic hubbub of planning the actual curriculum of their academy, they had never once stopped to think about what life would be like for the new Jedi _after_ they left Dantooine.  

“I’ll have to double check with my partner, but I’m sure that’s fine, ideal, even.” The colour seems to drain from Myri’s face.

“So it’s true, then, what they’re saying about you?”

“What is it they’re saying about me?”

“That you’re sheltering Kylo Ren.”

“Kylo Ren is dead,” Rey says, her voice calm. Too calm. “My partner is Ben Solo.” Myri nods at her slowly, intently.

“I see why you’re the one doing the recruiting, then. No offence.”

Myri smiles, and Rey lets out a laugh despite herself.

 

•°

 

She returns to the _Falcon_ that night, intent on giving Myri as much space to make her final decision as possible. To give her the luxury of choice that Rey had never had.

She sets Artoo off on trying to finetune the Falcon's hyperdrive to make their trips quicker. She heats her rations, already missing the smoked nerf with salthia bean paste that Myri had made for their lunch just several hours earlier.

_Corellian food gets old quickly._

The metal bowl she's holding clatters to the ground. "Force! You scared me half to death!"

_What made you think of it?_

Rey collects the bowl, setting it back on the table before leaning against the counter, a smug, proud smile crossing her lips. Ben sits in front of her, with her across the stars.

"I've got our first recruit." Their bond flushes with warmth. Ben rarely shows his happiness outwardly, she's learned over the years that when this feeling  
crashes over her, It means Ben's happy.

_Tell me about them._

"She's from Corellia but worked to ferry Hosnian refugees around the end of the war, she's helped to build a new city here, Nèamh City. Her name's Myri, Myri Antilles."

_Myri Antilles?_

"Yeah. Daughter of Wedge Antilles."

_I know._

“You do?"

_My uncle took me to Corellia when he went to try and convince her family to let her join the Academy._

"Why'd he take you?'' Ben sighs, brushing the hair that hangs in front of his forehead book across the side of his head. Even at his most angst-riddled, he’s still so handsome, Rey thinks.

_My father was on Corellia at the time._

Rey does the math in her head and a cold sadness settles over her.

"That was the last time you saw him." Ben uncrosses and recrosses his legs as he leans against the table. She wonders where in the Dantooine enclave he is.

_No. He left before we arrive, off to Abo Dreth, to close an arms deal against the Imperial Remnant._

It's a bitterly ironic life Ben Solo leads. They sit in silence for a moment, Rey totally incapable of conjuring the right words.

_Well done._

The moment passes, and Rey smiles, tearing her gaze from the floor to look at him once again. She beams up at him.

_Where are you going to next?_

“Gonmore. Myri believes there someone there who may be interested."

_Its an old smuggler's outpost. Odd that anyone should be there._

 

•°

 

Rey imagines she should be surprised when Myri tells her she wants to come with her to find more Force sensitives, but it does make sense. All that awaits on Dantooine is an empty enclave and the man formerly known as Kylo Ren.

Myri makes quick business of saying goodbye to her old life, with the trained precision of someone who has done this many times before, and they’re on their way to Gonmore before long.

Not one for wasting time, Rey brings Myri to the crew quarters once the _Falcon’s_ on autopilot in the hyperspace lane. The first lesson Myri will learn was one of Rey’s hardest to master: meditation.

 

•°

 

She’s like a wildfire during their first few weeks together, thoughts and emotions burning through everything, lighting up the dark vacuum of space like a sun in her own right. It drives Kylo – Ben – halfway mad. She corners him at utterly inappropriate moments whenever they’re not hunting Sithspawn, trapping him in the quad laser access tube as he remembers being chased by Chewbacca throughout the ship as a toddler.

She does not let him rest, always several steps ahead of him, literally and figuratively, and radiating such _hope_ it exhausts him to his core. She’s magnetic, though, impossible to not watch as she tears through the galaxy. He admits what he refused to acknowledge so many years ago: Rey is a force to be reckoned with. She is stronger, stronger than she knows, and as they root out Sithspawn he learns quickly that it’s easier to step back and let Rey take the lead than face the consequences of encroaching on her turf.

He’s in love with her in the most brutal way imaginable, has been, since that moment in the forest on Starkiller Base when she’d wrenched Anakin’s lightsaber from his grasp, since the moment their questioning hands had touched across the stars. He had masked it with hate as soon as she’d rebuked him, the Supreme Leader of the Galaxy couldn’t be in love with the one threat to his power.

But now, freed from the shackles of power, marooned in a life he had not chosen for himself, he could let the words spill from his lips when she wasn’t paying attention: _love, love, love_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mygeeto   
>  Ki-Adi-Mundi   
>  Havridam City   
>  Sithspawn  This particular plot was heavily influenced by  Diasterism's  wonderful fic,  we must be killers .  
> WEDGE ANTILLES  and...  
> ... his daughter  Myri   
>  Generis   
>  Nèamh City is a creation of my own, nèamh means "heaven" in Scots Gaelic, and a guide to pronunciation can be found  here   
>  Abo Dreth   
>  Gonmore 


End file.
